Nanny review – promising domestic worker thriller gets jumbled

A Senegalese immigrant nanny battles micro-aggressions and otherworldly forces in a novel yet loosely assembled debut

It’s remarkable how infrequently modern-day domestic workers are portrayed as fully formed characters in TV and film, given their ubiquity and necessity in the lives of so many. Perhaps part of that is because “the help” isn’t meant to be noticed (the flamboyant Fran Fine notwithstanding) or that the lives of low-wage people of color, many of whom are immigrants, haven’t traditionally piqued the interest of privileged Hollywood. When domestic workers do see screen time, it’s often through the gaze of the privileged.

Enter film-maker ​​Nikyatu Jusu, whose mother, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, had been a domestic worker. Raised in Atlanta, the young Jusu watched her parent “put her dreams to the side to be a peripheral mother in other mother’s narratives”.

Nanny is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced